What do you ask of me with your beauty, what are you urging
Of labour and painful aspiring to flatter your perfection?
What secretness of love with terrible blushes surging
Unseen, have found in you at last their passionate reflection?
What dreams that lovers knew, as sleep with subtle magic
Tore off the rags of life and made her dance with body spangled,
Drew back the vacant hours, the tedious and the tragic,
And showed the glittering souls from bodies we had mangled;--
What visions made you, emblem of longing and love that has died
unrequited,
And all lost joys, and tears, and beauty passionately given,
Winked at by folly, skewered by the butcher, danced on and
slighted,
That now spring up from death, showing their slayers the colours of
Heaven?
You have burst from the ground with your joy, you are pining and
bleeding,
Your scent is heavy with sorrowful love; oh, memories clinging,
What do you ask of my soul with such fierceness of pleading,
I that was glad to forget ... What do you need of my singing?
1916
Like flocks of tired birds when autumn comes,
My spirit flags across the darkening fields
And melts into the drabness of the sky
And falls like dust upon the huddled corn.
But many wizened faces brown and sad
Peer from the bushes as I wander past,--
They tell me all those things that old men say
As youth looks up through tears with pallid cheek.
"When you are grey and crooked as ourselves,
When you have bowed before all other gods,
And found them false, then shall you come at last
To that dark King of grief, and he shall bless
Your bread with tears, and manacle your hands,
And call you slave and lover." ...
Shall not a child take Pain for company
And share her loneliness with him?
Does not a youth know tears
In the first bitterness of broken love?
Is Grief so proud a king that none shall come
To seek him save the blind, the halt, the lame? ...
He is a tramp, a beggar, and a clown,
He sits a jester at the feet of kings
And scurries with the leaves in Autumn's train.
He rides the wooden horses at a fair,
And dances with the jiggers on the stage.
Led by the violins of discontent
That whine their music to my listening soul,
I dance with him the dance of withered leaves,
We dance together to the tunes of rain
Played on one note upon the only string.
1913
Oh, just beyond the curve of ideal quest
That changes as a sea wave to the wind,
Beyond the cloud that folds around a star,
And dawn, that stands ajar to let us in,
Lies that to which our loves and dreams have gone,
The paradise of all we might have been,
While we are washed back downwards in the dark
Where tides recede, to dwindle with the foam.
1917
Ah! you, from the small high-walled acre of your lives,
Your windows only looking upon gardens,
Only perceiving love and death and truth
As facts that come to pass,
That pass and leave you still
Within your safe small prisons,
Older, duller,
To walk and talk among the evergreens.
You have never known
Delight of dying slowly,
Poisoned with raptures
In many hues from the slim-cut decanters of death--
The tunes
That dishevel and smooth,
Cajole and melancholize--
The dance
Which is a whirling of leaves
In their last scorn of sorrow
Flung upwards by the wind
Into the haggard face of winter--
Nor felt your souls go blowing like balloons
Tossed by impulsive hands;
Nor slid as skaters swiftly
Over the crackling crystals of perilous ice,
Buffeted with bouquets and blinded with confetti ...
You have not felt the abandon
Of light love
Dragged by the hair across a slippery floor....
1916
Mouth of the dust I kiss, corruption absolute,
Worm, that shall come at last to be my paramour,
Envenomed, unseen wanderer who alone is mute,
Yet greater than gods or heroes that have gone before.
For you I sheave the harvest of my hair,
For you the whiteness of my flesh, my passion's valour,
For you I throw upon the grey screen of the air
My prism-like conceptions, my gigantic colour.
For you the delicate hands that fashion to make great
Clay, and white paper, plant a tongue in silence,
For you the battle-frenzy, and the might of hate,
Science for giving wounds, and healing science.
For you the heart's wild love, beauty, long care,
Virginity, passionate womanhood, perfected wholeness,
For you the unborn child that I prepare,
You, flabby, boneless, brainless, senseless, soulless!
1913
The curtains are drawn as though it still were night,
A slip of dawn between them is a dangling silver ribbon;
And all about the room is quietness--Each patient chair
Erect, alert, in place. A letter on the table and a book
Lie as you left them, now bereft of purpose--
Garish a little in the room's sedateness, you
Returning dressed so frivolously in all your coloured clothes!
How grey and sober, full of placid wit
The furniture, the pictures on the wall;
How steely swift the light, stabbing you to the heart
As you stand at the window, bright as rushing blood.
Garish your hair, your shoes, your startling chalky face
And white, white gloves ...
What time is it? ... Still ticks the tireless clock,
With face grimacing ... nearly six it is....
Yet hurries not nor lingers, like our hearts,
For in its dial eternity is housed--
A cock should crow ... there are no cocks in town!
But a water cart with surly noise below
Grates unconcerned along the disconsolate street.
How cold and how familiar all these things,
To you so lonely in the enormous dawn
Slowly unfastening that vermilion dress ...
1916